INTRODUCTION

    Even though growing up in the 80/90's means i spent quite a bit of time in the arcades and even owned some game consoles I never did warm up to next generation ones by Nintendo, Microsoft (Xbox) or Sony (PlayStation). Still although the same applies even today there's simply no way for me to ignore that countless people do enjoy using gaming consoles and yes, that includes even handheld models. The arrival of current generation handheld models like the ASUS ROG Ally and Steam Deck has brought M.2 2230 NVMe SSDs back to the spotlight and today with me I have one of the latest models released primarily for consumers looking for fast storage media, the Gen4 UD90 2TB by Silicon Power.

    Founded in 2003 by a group of enthusiastic data storage industry experts, Silicon Power is committed to delivering outstanding product and service quality. Headquartered and with our own state-of-the-art production site in Taipei, we have become a leading manufacturer of flash memory cards, USB flash drives, portable hard drives, solid state drives, DRAM modules and industrial-grade products. As an international player with four branch offices around the globe, we continuously strive to offer the perfect data storage solution for all requirements of modern digitalized life. With a strong focus on combining innovative technology and award-winning design, we live up to our brand promise to reliably preserve and protect your most valuable data. Because memory is personal.

    Just like the M.2 2280 series I reviewed back in 2022 the M.2 2230 UD90 is available in 500GB/1TB/2TB capacities and is once again based on the 4-channel (ARM Cortex-R5 single processor) PS5021-E21 NVMe v1.4 DRAM-less NAND flash controller by PHISON paired with Micron's 176-layer 3D QLC NAND flash (N48R). Again, the PS5021-E21 NAND flash controller by PHISON features their 4th Gen LDPC engine (low-density parity check) along with end-to-end data path protection, Host Memory Buffer (HMB) architecture support (uses a fraction of your PC's system memory to cache mapping tables), wear levelling, low power mode, thermal throttling (70 degrees Celsius limit), TRIM, bad block management, static/dynamic range SLC cache and SmartECC 2.0 (RAID ECC) and fully supports AES-256bit hardware encryption along with TCG Opal 2.0 and Pyrite. Silicon Power covers the entire UD90 line of M.2 NVMe Gen4 SSDs with a 5-year limited warranty and regarding durability they report an MTBF (meantime between failures) of 1.5 million hours and a TBW of 300 for the 512GB model, 600 for the 1TB model and 1200 for the 2TB model. So, time to see just what you can expect from the "cut down" version of the popular UD90 M.2 NVMe SSD by Silicon Power.